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The January jobs report released by the Department of Labor today gives further evidence of why CKE Restaurants CEO Andrew Puzder is the wrong choice to lead that agency. The report found that while a healthy number of jobs were created, wage growth was very disappointing, with a miniscule 0.1% increase in wages over the last month. The current economic situation, where job creation does not equate with wage growth is bad news for working people. Corporations are creating jobs that don’t sustain families let alone pay the bills.

As you can read on AntiLaborSecretary.org, Puzder would be a bad Labor Secretary for so many reasons—such as his record of taking money out of the pockets of the people who work for him at Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., to line his own. Puzder’s supporters counter that he would be a job creator as Labor Secretary. But what kind of jobs does Puzder create? Unsustainable ones. Puzder makes his money by paying wages so low that taxpayer-funded safety-net programs subsidize his business by approximately $247 million per year. Puzder’s restaurants pay people so poorly they must enroll in Medicaid, State Children’s Health Insurance, the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to make ends meet.

As Labor Secretary nominee Andrew Puzder prepares for his confirmation hearing, it’s a given that he’ll have to answer questions about his views on minimum wage. To curry support from senators of both parties, he may state that he backs increasing the minimum wage. But no matter what Puzder says, his record makes it clear that he has no plans to endorse any significant increase, leaving millions of working people struggling to make ends meet.

Case in point: In 2006, Puzder contributed $10,000 to defeat a ballot measure in Nevada that aimed to raise the state’s minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour. Puzder was so determined to block Nevadans from receiving a small bump in their pay that he contributed nearly two-thirds of what a full-time, minimum wage earner gets in a year, just to kill the measure.

President Donald Trump’s nominee for labor secretary really doesn’t like minimum wage increases: He once spent $10,000 to oppose a pay bump of one dollar an hour.

Andrew Puzder, CEO of the company that franchises Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants, gave the money in 2006 to battle a Nevada ballot measure to raise the state minimum wage from $5.15 (the federal minimum wage at the time) to $6.15. The donation put him among the top 10 donors trying to prevent the wage increase, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Fast food companies and the National Restaurant Association outspent labor unions supporting the measure, but voters overwhelmingly approved the raise, with nearly 69 percent of the vote. As a result, Nevada’s wage is still one dollar above the federal one, at $8.25 per hour, today. Employers can pay a dollar less if they provide health benefits.

Andrew Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurant Holdings (CKE), which owns several fast food chains including Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, has been nominated to be Secretary of Labor by President-Elect Donald Trump. The Secretary of Labor is the nation’s most senior official tasked with ensuring the well-being of workers and advancing their employment opportunities, and is therefore of great importance to women and their families. The Secretary of Labor oversees the Department of Labor’s interpretation and enforcement of a number of laws vital to women’s economic security and right to be free from discrimination, such as the minimum wage and overtime protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Affordable Care Act, and executive orders prohibiting employment discrimination by federal contractors and setting labor standards for federal contractors’ employees, including protection of the right to earn paid sick days.

Mr. Puzder’s record demonstrates that he should not be confirmed to this important position.

In her testimony at a January 10th forum featuring fast-food workers mistreated by the Carl’s Jr. restaurant chain headed by labor secretary nominee Andrew Puzder, NELP Executive Director Christine Owens once again outlined the extreme contradiction of the president-elect’s pick for labor secretary.

As Owens explained, Congress established the Department of Labor more than 100 years ago in order to separate the competing interests of commerce and labor in the federal government, which were originally housed in a single cabinet agency.

“I was the victim of wage theft, exploitation, and of a stolen paycheck. I was never paid for time I regularly worked before clocking in. Every time I spoke up about the problem I was retaliated against by having my hours cut and my shifts changed.”

Those were the powerful words of long-time Carl’s Jr. employee Roberto Ramirez as he spoke in Spanish before a Senate forum this week. The treatment Ramirez tearfully described was illegal, exactly the type of abuse working people depend on the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate and remedy. But the man ultimately responsible for working conditions at Carl’s Jr. – the chief executive who built his personal fortune on the mistreatment of workers like Mr. Ramirez – is now Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Labor, charged with enforcing these very laws.

The confirmation hearing for Andrew Puzder, Trump’s choice for Labor secretary, is scheduled for Jan. 17. While I’m sure the CKE Restaurant chief exec would prefer to answer questions like how much bacon he likes on his Double Bacon 3-way Burger™, here are a few of our suggestions for his confirmation hearings to suss out his vision for the workers of America.

President-elect Donald Trump announced that he plans to nominate fast food CEO Andrew Puzder to head the Department of Labor (DOL). Puzder, who makes millions as a low-wage employer, fails every test for a Labor Secretary. DOL’s mission is to improve the wages and working conditions of working Americans, but Puzder wants to keep wages low and threatens to replace his fast food chain’s employees with robots if the minimum wage rises enough to crimp his profits.

He’s opposed to the new overtime rule that gave the right to time and a half pay to millions of salaried employees earning less than $47,476 a year. Walmart has already raised its managers’ pay, as did about half of all big retailers, even before the rule was supposed to take effect on December 1. But Puzder wants to kill it so he can keep working low-paid employees without paying them a dime extra for their overtime hours.